1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to L-arginine producing Escherichia coli and a method of producing L-arginine by fermentation using Escherichia coli. L-arginine is an industrially useful amino acid as ingredients of liver function promoting agents, amino acid transfusions, comprehensive amino acid preparations and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known that some mutants of Escherichia coli resistant to analogs of arginine and pyrimidines produce arginine (Pierard A. and Glansdorf N., Mol. Gen. Genet., 118, 235, 1972. and Glansdorf N., Biosynthesis of arginine and polyamines. In “E. coli and Salm. thyphimurium, 1996). Additionally, the methods for producing arginine using mutants of E. coli resistant to some other drugs or recombinant strain of E. coli into which a gene encoding an enzyme of arginine biosynthetic pathway is introduced are known.
In arginine biosynthetic pathway of E. coli K12 one mole of acetyl-CoA is consumed and one mole of acetic acid is released to produce one molecule of arginine (FIG. 1). As a result of the acetate by-production, a significant part of carbon source is wasted, besides, the accumulation of acetate worsens the growth of culture of arginine producers.
It is also known that E. coli can not effectively utilize acetate as carbon source.